Angry in the Great White North

There are 308 ridings in Canada.  Three or more candidates in each submit filings to Elections Canada accounting for their spending.  It takes some time to work through them all.

How do you organize the people that do this work?

By region?  That's not how it's done.

By random assignment of filings?  That's a good idea, but not the way it works.

As hard as it is to believe, it is by party.

This comes to me from a senior Conservative Party source that will remain unnamed.

Think about it.  One group of people does all the NDP filings.  Another all the Liberal.  Another all the Conservative.  And so on.

Now let's say that one team of people was using a slightly different set of rules from the others.  If the teams were organized by region, we'd see a spike of rejections in one region.  If the assignment was random, the rejections would be distributed across regions and parties.

But by party?  Now it makes sense why the Conservatives suffered all the problems.  All their filings were evaluated by the same group of people following the same rules.  But apparently not the same rules as the other teams working exclusively on other party filings.

A few nights ago, on Mike Duffy Live, Liberal MP Marlene Jennings was on, making only one point over and over again.  All the parties were audited the same way by the same people.  The Conservatives were the only ones with problems.

Maybe the Conservatives were the only ones flagged, but despite Jennings' assertions, the same people do not evaluate the returns for all the parties.  And from that you can immediately be concerned that the rules won't be applied the same way.

As an engineer, this is appalling.  Randomizing sets is a great way to mitigate the effects of errors.  As errors occur, they can cancel each other out.  On the other hand, this sort of arrangement, by party, guarantees unequal treatment.

Of course, you'd expect the problems to mostly minor, most of the time.  But a large error in one team's approach can dramatically skew the results.

So is all this an innocent mistake?  At the heart of it, possibly.  But the one benefit of this sort of arrangement is that when an egregious error happens, it is easier to spot.  Someone would have noticed the Conservative in-and-out movement of funds being treated differently from everyone else's.  That realization would have made it easier to correct the misinterpretation and ensure that the same rules were being universally applied.

So why didn't this happen?  Assuming that the Conservatives didn't do anything wrong (and certainly that is my thinking, based on evidence), why would the skewed result be allowed to stand?

I suppose there are two answers.  Neither of them reflect well on Elections Canada.

The milder explanation is that the result confirmed some sort of preconceived notion about Conservative perfidy.  Instead of questioning the strange result, the leadership at Elections Canada ran with it.

But that seems weird too.  It suggests that the senior staff at Elections Canada are asleep at the switch, totally missing the obvious explanation that one team was using the wrong interpretation.

An interpretation that makes Elections Canada more competent also suggests greater guilt.  If Elections Canada really does have an axe to grind with the Conservatives, and with Stephen Harper in particular, then it is likely they would have arranged the auditing of candidate filings along party lines.  This wasn't an accident, or a sign of incompetence, but a deliberate move designed to reach a particular goal.  Marlene Jennings thinks the same auditors are working all the filings, but nothing is farther from the truth.  If I wanted one group of filings to be treated differently, I would make sure the same people processed those filings, after making sure that team was working with a subtly different set of rules.

All of this could be dismissed as the feverish workings of a partisan mind, but there are three facts that we now know are true:

• Elections Canada assigns candidate filings to the same auditors along party lines, and only those party's filings to those auditors
• The Conservative Party was the only party singled out despite clear examples of the same funding and advertising techniques in all the parties
• Stephen Harper has had battles with Elections Canada going back years

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